I talk about Personal Growth, Management, Infrastructure and More | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
The reason behind my last emails
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It’s simple. I’ve shown you how smart people can make stupid mistakes. How costly they are. How amazingly common they are. The wrong team, the wrong assumptions, the wrong risks transferred. Simple. Foreseeable. Evitable. But… You see them over, and over again. You and I as taxpayers pay the price. And if you work in infrastructure… and you are in these “saraos” (projects), you can pay an even higher price. Endless nights without sleeping, hours and hours wasted in never-ending meetings, irrespirable ambiance at work, having to go to the toilet with a lawyer next to you, demotions, bye, bye bonuses, and much more. Not worthy to be there. Not worthy to make those evitable mistakes. So, next week I’m doubling the price of my reflections about my last project, Puhoi to Warkworth highway, that you have below. There is too much value there, and the price is a joke. Compare it to the value of those lessons and what you can get from them. I know it, people that have bought know it, and even some of you have written to tell me just that. So, if you were hesitant, now it’s the moment. Tomorrow, it will be also a great moment. You’ll just be paying more.
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Vicente Valencia
I talk about Personal Growth, Management, Infrastructure and More | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
Parkinson’s Law: Work fills the space you give it. “If you give yourself three years to complete something, completion will take three years.” Now replace “three” with whatever number… like eight. That’s what I keep seeing in infrastructure. Projects designed to take 8… 10… 12 years. Not because they need it. Because nobody in the room knows how fast it can actually be done. Some clients hire advisors who have never delivered a project at scale. Or with no direct experience in the type of...
There is a project that I follow even if I live now at the other side of the Pacific. It is… or it was… or it will be one day, one of the most ambitious (and game changer) infrastructure projects in the world. It was also meant to be a PPP. California High-Speed Rail The idea sounded great: Connect major cities. Reduce emissions. Transform mobility. On paper, it had everything. In reality… it had a problem. The scope was never stable… and still it’s not. Routes changed. Stations moved....
Not corruption. Not politics. Just… incompetence. A real project. $800M. In LatAm… No more details, as in this distribution list, there are too many people living in that country… Here you are the 4 red flags that would have helped you to smell blood miles away. First red flag: They didn’t understand their own project. I’m not exaggerating. They launched the RFP with: Misaligned traffic studies Outdated geotech data A design that didn’t match the environmental permits Second: They outsourced...